Glossary of Literary Terms - Prose

Glossary of Critical Terms for Prose

Adapted from "LitWeb," The Norton Introduction to Literature Study Space



Action Any event or series of events depicted in a literary work; an event may be verbal as well as physical, so that speaking or telling a story within the story may be an event.

Allusion A brief, often implicit and indirect reference within a literary text to something outside the text, whether another text (e.g. the Bible, a myth, another literary work, a painting, or a piece of music) or any imaginary or historical person, place, or thing.

Ambiguity When we are involved in interpretation--figuring out what different elements in a story "mean"--we are responding to a work's ambiguity. This means that the work is open to several simultaneous interpretations. Language, especially when manipulated artistically, can communicate more than one meaning, encouraging our interpretations.

Antagonist A character or a nonhuman force that opposes, or is in conflict with, the protagonist.

Anticlimax An event or series of events usually at the end of a narrative that contrast with the tension building up before.

Antihero A protagonist who is in one way or another the very opposite of a traditional hero. Instead of being courageous and determined, for instance, an antihero might be timid, hypersensitive, and indecisive to the point of paralysis. Antiheroes are especially common in modern literary works.

Archetype A character, ritual, symbol, or plot pattern that recurs in the myth and literature of many cultures; examples include the scapegoat or trickster (character type), the rite of passage (ritual), and the quest or descent into the underworld (plot pattern). The term and our contemporary understanding of it derive from the work of psychologist Carl Jung (1875? 1961), who argued that archetypes emerge from--and give us a clue to the workings of--the "collective unconscious," a reservoir of memories and impulses that all humans share but aren't consciously aware of.

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Author The real author who actually wrote a narrative, not to be confused with the implied author, or authorial persona adopting an outlook implied by the work as a whole (and that may differ drastically from that of the real author). The author should not be confused with the narrator who tells the story. When a narrator tells a story in the first person, it does not mean that the author is telling his/her own experiences.

Bildungsroman (German for "education novel") A novel that depicts the intellectual, emotional, and moral development of its protagonist from childhood into adulthood; also sometimes called an apprenticeship novel. This type of novel tends to envision character as the product of environment, experience, nurture, and education (in the widest sense) rather than of nature, fate, and so on.

Biography A work of nonfiction that recounts the life of a real person. If the person depicted in a biography is also its author, then we use the term autobiography. An autobiography that focuses only on a specific aspect of, or episode in, its author's life is a memoir.

Canon The range of works that a consensus of scholars, teachers, and readers of a particular time and culture consider "great" or "major."

Character An imaginary person who acts, appears, or is referred to in a literary work. Major or main character: central character that receives most attention. Minor character: marginal or secondary character that receives less attention. Flat character: relatively simple and two-dimensional character with few traits and predictable behavior or responses. Round character: complex, multifaceted character capable of surprising the readers. Static characters do not change while dynamic characters do.

Characterization. The presentation or delineation of a fictional personage. Direct characterization or direct definition occurs when the narrator explicitly tells what a character is like. Indirect characterization or indirect presentation occurs when the narrative reveals a character's trait/s implicitly, through his or her speech, behavior, thoughts, appearance, and so on.

Climax. The third part of plot (see Freytag's pyramid), the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing; also called turning point.

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Coming-of-Age Story A narrative in which a character--often a child or young person--first learns a significant, usually life-changing truth about the universe, society, people, or himself or herself; also called an initiation or rites-of-passage story.

Complication In plot, an action or event that introduces a new conflict or intensifies the existing one, especially during the rising action phase of plot.

Conclusion Also called resolution, the fifth and last phase or part of plot, the point at which the conflictive or destabilized situation at the beginning becomes stable once more and the conflict is resolved.

Conflict A struggle between opposing forces that sets the action in motion. An external conflict pits a character against something or someone outside himself or herself--another character or characters or something in nature or society. An internal conflict happens when the opposing forces are two drives, impulses, or parts of a single character.

Crisis In plot, the moment when the conflict comes to a head, often requiring the character to make a decision; sometimes the crisis is equated with the climax or turning point and sometimes it is treated as a distinct moment that precedes, and prepares for, the climax.

D?nouement (French for "untying" as of a knot) A plot-related term used in three ways: (1) as a synonym for falling action, (2) as a synonym for conclusion or resolution, and (3) as the label for a phase following the conclusion in which any loose ends are tied up. See Freytag's pyramid.

Dialogue 1) Usually, the representation of an oral exchange involving two or more characters. 2) More rarely, a literary work that consists mainly or entirely of the speech of two or more characters.

Diction Choice of words that largely determines the tone of a narrative and influences the style of the creative piece of fiction. Informal or colloquial diction resembles everyday speech Formal diction: lofty, impersonal, and dignified language

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Discriminated Occasion A specific, discrete moment portrayed in a fictional work, often signaled by phrases such as "At 5:05 in the morning . . . ," "It was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season . . . ," or "the day before Maggie fell down. . . ."

Epilogue In fiction, a short section or chapter that comes after the conclusion, tying up loose ends and often describing what happens to the characters after the resolution of the conflict.

Epiphany A sudden moment of illumination or revelation of truth, often inspired by a seemingly simple or commonplace event. The term, originally from Christian theology, was first popularized by the Irish fiction writer James Joyce, who evoked the epiphanic realizations of his characters in his collected short stories entitled Dubliners.

Episode A distinct action or series of actions within a plot.

Exposition The first phase or part of plot (see Freytag's pyramid), which sets the scene, introduces and identifies characters, while establishing the situation at the beginning of a story. Additional information is often scattered throughout the work.

Fable An ancient type of short fiction, in verse or prose, illustrating a moral or satirizing human beings. The characters in a fable are often animals that talk and act like human beings. The fable is sometimes treated as a specific type of folktale and sometimes as a fictional subgenre in its own right.

Falling Action The fourth of the five phases or parts of plot (see Freytag's pyramid), in which the conflict or conflicts move toward resolution.

Fantasy A genre of literary work featuring strange settings and characters and often involving magic or the supernatural; though closely related to horror and science fiction, fantasy is typically less concerned with the macabre or with science and technology.

Fiction Any narrative, especially in prose, about invented or imagined characters and action. Today, fiction falls into three major subgenres based on length--the short story, novella, and novel. Older, originally oral forms of short fiction include the fable, legend, parable, and tale. Fictional works may also be categorized not by their length but by their handling of particular

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elements such as plot and character. Detective and science fiction, for example, are subgenres. Others fictions include gothic, romance, historical and nonfiction.

Figurative language Language that uses figures of speech or literary devices to express ideas.

Flashback A plot-structuring device inserting a scene from the fictional past into the fictional present.

Flash-forward A plot-structuring device inserting a scene from the fictional future into the fictional present.

Focalization The perspective from which the narrated situations and events are presented. Internal focalization: perspective locatable in one character because it highlights the feelings and thoughts of that character. External focalization: a perspective located outside the characters, merely reporting events and actions from the outside, that is, without access to feelings and thoughts. Other equivalent terms are internal narration and external narration.

Foil A character with behavior and/or values that contrast those of another character in order to highlight the distinctive temperament of that character.

Foreshadowing A hint or clue about what will happen at a later moment in the plot.

Freytag's Pyramid. A diagram of plot structure first created by the German novelist and critic Gustav Freytag (1816?1895).

Genre A type or category of works sharing particular formal or textual features and conventions; especially used to refer to the largest categories for classifying literature--fiction, poetry,

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